


Untitled 13 (Jade Flower Palace)

by losselen (zambla)



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-19
Updated: 2014-03-19
Packaged: 2018-01-16 07:01:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1336345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zambla/pseuds/losselen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Obi-Wan measures the distance between himself and his Master.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Untitled 13 (Jade Flower Palace)

1.

 

 

The stream swirls. The wind moans in  
The pines. Grey rats scurry over  
Broken tiles.

 

Obi-Wan remembers a mission to Kosni once, when it was snowing, slowly and not heavily. He's seen snow a thousand times before and a thousand times since but that time—that once—he remembers vividly. His hands were red and raw from rubbing. It was hard—very hard—to resist the dull numbness in his joints. When they (he and his Master) had arrived at one of the eastern outposts the soldiers there had made a small fire and scattered themselves around it. The two of them settled between it and the night, watching in silence as the priest's voice stretched over the enormous frost-furred pines. The snow melted in this hands, glittery and soft and dangerous; he remembers watching his Master's form ease itself into the blue darkness as everyone cleared the fire and retreated indoors.

He remembers stillness.

In the morning, getting up and meditating in the snow. Another layer of it had fallen during the night but the sky had cleared. A deeply red sun climbed slowly; a hawkish bird lifted its wings, coldly and mathematically, and wailed a sharp anguish. Obi-Wan's breathing was not even enough. The planet was still—from the surface of it a resounding _still_ , still to the core. And if he was still enough he picked up in echo the shape of that consciousness.

On the cedar branches there were shags of ice. He was meditating on that—how the sheaths of ice and all this snow will melt come some time, how nothing will survive of the frost when the sky falls dark.

It is a cold night in the Temple gardens. Thinking of this he immediately thinks of a text he'd read some time ago:

The flowing river  
never stops  
and yet the water  
never stays  
the same.  
  
Foam floats upon the pools,  
scattering, re-forming,  
never lingering long.  
So it is with man  
and all his dwelling places  
here on earth.

The truth is, Obi-Wan has only a shallow intuition of the seasons. He knows climates, yes, thousands of them, cataloged in average temperatures and precipitations and dominant vegetation, but not the fluxes, no, the soft and subtle difference stretching within the regularity of frame, pervading. All of this has always been elusive to his judgment. Coruscant has no equinox to speak of in such epic terms and what he remembers of his birth planet are broken pieces of warmth.

He does remember one thing very distinctly about his life before coming to the Jedi.

In all his recollections it was irretrievably, distinctly _winter_ —he must have been only two and how he grew aware of the seasons he does not know—and the night sprawled outside cold and hard and dark. His mother was holding him and they were next to a fire. In his mind he sensed its brightness and its cackling laughter. When his mother put him down—to tend to some one thing or another—he'd made towards it, stumbling, half-walking, and felt its effulgent flare for a moment. But immediately after was the bright bright hurt and after that winter was always _fire_.

He told Qui-Gon about the memory—on Kosni after the sun had risen and the frost began to melt. Qui-Gon nodded slowly.

They stood side by side, watching the priest relight the flame and the fire itself coming alive green and red and bright.

 

 

2.

 

What prince, long ago,  
Built this palace, standing in  
Ruins beside the cliffs? There are  
Green ghost fires in the black rooms.  
The shattered pavements are all  
Washed away. Ten thousand organ  
Pipes whistle and roar.

 

When he was young he used to keep notes from his meditations. For three years in various forms—keystrokes, paper, et cetera—he would scribble down those segments of fluid, novel logic. They were always like that—grounded deeply in the sinew of reason and metaphysics, guided and probing, from pain to desire to fear. He dated and organized them meticulously. Eventually some ended up in a brown notebook the size of his palm.

As he got older he'd read them now and then, often reflectively, sometimes listlessly. He can't quite remember his reactions, only his probing in the enormity of a section in timespace he'd labeled childhood for the signs of an adult consciousness. It was in many ways indulgent, he knows. He'd kept it in a box alongside a segment of his braid and some keepsakes. Every time he took it out he always put it back painstakingly, his hand folded over the curled covers, his fingers over the spine. He remembers the binding precisely.

Tatooine, he learns, has a strange winter.

The planet itself has a precession that's slower than most of its neighbors' (it is located at an meta-stable equilibrium between the gravitational field of the binary stars), making geological changes in climate gradual, if not impossible. The vegetation, therefore, are long-adapted to the desert. Winter sweeps through the dunes in sparse and violent bursts of rain, and in a flash of flood the world would be drowned—and then dried. The nights after a storm are especially cold. The xerophytes know their territory, with long and strong roots that tap under the sand. It makes him think of his old Master sometimes, the way they keep that coarse grayness on their skin and the water of life banked deep within, beneath.

Through the night's beginning's brief dramatics to the unkind heat, the cold lingers without fire.

The cold burns through his defenses. The wind whistles through and sizzles among the bristles of brush.

Much of his earlier meditations were on the subject of fear.

In fear were the seeds of instability and horror. Fear is comapnionless. Fear's mouth glides over your skin and draws you to the chasm and holds you there in high brinksmanship.

But how can he divorce himself form the womb of fear? The ingrained dread bred into him from the beginning—how can he dismiss the leaping night yawning before him, the slack-mouthed thing marking his humanness, how he is alive absolutely? How can the ant not scurry to hoard for that winter ahead, always long, always hard?

When he was young he had always answered with the memory answer: that he is Jedi before human. Human before animal.

But standing from the unreal season, in the unreal landscape, he knows that the boundaries he has defined for his beginning and end are artificial. He cannot conceive of this mind of winter, one that can accept such a winter of the mind, one that is futile by circumstance or volition or mistake and yet can resign to the absurd emptiness. But to _be_ was the contingency of his existence—not its name and description—and the roles and rules are self-imposed. He can hear Master Qui-Gon's voice, quiet, unhurried: but does that undermine the initial question? It is granted that the nature of the language we use can neither express nor destroy to any exactitude but does that invalidate the pure, unabstracted initial thought?

It isn't memory answers that he needs.

The answer he finds buried in the thousand little things he takes to with ritualistic repetitiveness: cleaning, cooking, making tea, folding away clothes in the stillness of his meditations. He has thought of it before. It lingers at the pads of his fingers and travels upstream his _neura_ and veins into the cavernous organ of his consciousness. It rings in his mind, between his ears, between his eyes, a vibrant thing as tangible as warm flesh and as phenomenal as the delicate flux of texture if he were to commit to motion that flesh. He has only to know that it had happened already, that everything is transient, and everything suffers. There is no use in expecting compensation in the simple fact of being a bubble in the water.

It isn't the desire for life that is dangerous; it is dangerous because life is a vicious creature all on its own. It twines like stubborn vine, even to winter.

He drags his hands in the sand, dreaming, perhaps, of water.

And there the humility enfolds him quietly, even though he'd known that the solitude and singularity would change him, bend him to its horror and calm. _Peace_ , peace from the luminous hold of guilt. There is nothing in indulging the past and letting his mind wander into the dark craters left by his failure.

During his first days on Tatooine he had thought that the thoughts of Anakin would plague him forever—but it didn't, doesn't, not really. And he, alone and unknown, reached a sort of balance with the world.

Fear was the winter.

The answer, in the end, is easy and unimportant. He only has to extrapolate himself from its formation—to be not reagent but vessel—like picking berries from the vine—tasting only its juices, its flesh giving, its sudden solidity coming before him, how the bliss of revelation was sweet, the sweetest.

And perhaps this is why he stopped taking meditation notes a long time ago. It is not an exercise in logic; it cannot be contained in a simple wrinkle of formalism.

Qui-Gon had been trying to teach him that all along, it seems: that the letter and the object are really different things, that there is always the danger of obfuscating the reality with the name. The Code is a series of abstracted compromises. Fear and winter. They fit together differently in his mouth and in his mind.

When he was a Padawan, he'd always been keenly self-conscious of the way he was different from his Master. In the flesh, in the mind, in the intangible sphere of personality. Yet now—now—he cannot help but count the ways they'd become so very, very alike.

 

 

3.

 

The storm  
Scatters the red autumn leaves.  
His dancing girls are yellow dust.  
Their painted cheeks have crumbled  
Away. His gold chariots  
And courtiers are gone. Only  
A stone horse is left of his  
Glory.

 

 

Obi-Wan spreads his hands over Qui-Gon's cloak. There is a faint trace of the laundry's ghost. He is folding clothes in his Master's room. The cloth is cold as it lies over the soft surface of the bed, covering most of it and spilling onto the floor. He hasn't been here for long; Qui-Gon will be expecting him for a session soon. In a few moments he will fold the cloak away along the lines of scent, and then, he will stand up and leave the room. But for now he is still beside it, manipulating his fingers into the bunched up wrinkles. _There_ , these inches will fit over the shoulders, _there_ , the fringes will touch the ground, and _here_ , shallowly beneath my fingers his spine will curl and flex and uphold his body.

There is a phantom, luscent heat in the Force and even though he knows it, knows its owner and origin, he still touches along its sides and strands as if he'd felt its embrace for only the first time. After a moment's hesitation, he dips his hands and lowers his forehead onto the coarse fabric.

 

 

4.

 

I sit on the grass and  
Start a poem, but the pathos of  
It overcomes me. The future  
Slips imperceptibly away.  
Who can say what the years will bring?

 

Qui-Gon's possessions—there were very few—ha had packed into a box. He doesn't know what to do with it. He's staring at its clean and black geometry as it soaks into the Coruscant sunset.

 

 

 

*

The stream swirls. The wind moans in  
The pines. Grey rats scurry over  
Broken tiles. What prince, long ago,  
Built this palace, standing in  
Ruins beside the cliffs? There are  
Green ghost fires in the black rooms.The shattered pavements are all  
Washed away. Ten thousand organ  
Pipes whistle and roar. The storm  
Scatters the red autumn leaves.  
His dancing girls are yellow dust.  
Their painted cheeks have crumbled  
Away. His gold chariots  
And courtiers are gone. Only  
A stone horse is left of his  
Glory. I sit on the grass and  
Start a poem, but the pathos of  
It overcomes me. The future  
Slips imperceptibly away.  
Who can say what the years will bring?

"Jade Flower Palace" by Tu Fu  
Tr: K. Rexroth

**Author's Note:**

> The text Obi-Wan mentions is Kamo no Chomei's Hokoji.


End file.
